Parlando: The COC Blog

4/22/2014

An emotional response to Hercules

On April 3, 2014, the Canadian Opera Company invited veterans groups and their families to the BMO Financial Group Student Dress Rehearsal of Peter Sellars' production of Handel’s Hercules. See what they had to say about this moving production and watch as they share their experiences with us.

Not to Perish: Peter Sellars on Hercules, Handel's poignant examination of psychic breakdown

By Nikita Gourski, Development Communications Officer

“We have art so that we might not perish from the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“There’s an idea that opera is some
useless entertainment for rich people
and has no larger civic function,”
notes American director Peter Sellars.
“And for me it’s really the opposite.”

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
and educated at Harvard University,
Sellars first captured the public’s
attention with a 1981 production of
Handel’s Orlando, which he set in
the milieu of the U.S. space program
on Cape Canaveral. Two years later
he was awarded the MacArthur
Fellowship, colloquially known as the
“Genius Grant.” He was 25 years old.

Since then, Sellars, who in addition
to directing opera, theatre and film, is
a professor in UCLA’s World Arts and
Culture Department, has fascinated
North American and European
audiences with his unorthodox
stagings. Some of his early efforts –
notably the trilogy of Mozart/
Da Ponte operas (Don Giovanni,
Così fan tutte, and Le nozze di Figaro)
which he set, respectively, in a New
York City ghetto, a seaside diner, and
Trump Tower – were viciously attacked
by certain operagoers and critics.

But the passage of time has
allowed for a more thoughtful, and
overwhelmingly positive, assessment
of his work to emerge. “That people
seemed eager to write off Sellars
as an enfant terrible attempting to
shoehorn opera into a pair of Nikes,”
wrote Adam Wasserman in Opera
News two years ago, “was likely the
result, I think, of his ideas hitting
uncomfortably close to home.”

But if Sellars has sought to put
audiences in touch with the moral
tensions and social problems of their
day, it’s because his overarching
ambition has been to rejuvenate
theatre as an arena for political
consciousness, to let opera speak
to our society with the same
invigorating immediacy as Greek
drama did for the ancient Athenians.
In the words of scholar Julian
Young, the tragic festival in ancient
Greece “was a sacred occasion on
which the community was gathered
into a clarifying affirmation of its
fundamental ethos – that which made
it the community it was.” You did not,
in other words, attend the theatre
to escape the world, but to see it
more clearly; not to forget yourself,
but to discover your membership
in the political body; not to divert
your attention from problems, but to
participate in the search for answers.

With the new COC production
of Handel’s Hercules, built in
collaboration with Lyric Opera of
Chicago, Sellars is as adventurous as
ever in pursuing that project. He sees
in Hercules an examination of what
we now call post-traumatic stress
disorder; in less medically precise
terms, the heartbreaking tangle of
problems faced by returning soldiers
and their families. He invites modern
reality into the opera house, not to
give the production a novel gloss,
but to release the universal elements
of Handel’s work within a grid of
contemporary signs: battle fatigues;
Abu-Ghraib orange jumpsuits; flagdraped
coffins – and to emphasize
that the social and psychological toll
of warfare isn’t a bygone relic but an
everyday reality.

“We’re now beginning to talk about
this, because the situation in the
United States is that one out of three
homeless persons is a veteran,”
Sellars says. “You have people whose
lives have been so destroyed, whose
capacity to live a meaningful life
has been so devastated, who have
everything stacked against them, even
though they served [their country].”

Handel’s opera is based largely on
Women of Trachis, a tragedy by
Sophocles who, in addition to being
a first-rate dramatist, was also a war
general. He brought a rare insight
to the emotionally intense – even
dangerous – landscape that soldiers
and their families had to navigate
after reuniting. More than 2,000
years later, in 1745, Handel tackled
the material with Hercules, an
oratorio-opera hybrid he, himself,
labeled a “musical drama.”

In the opera, Hercules returns
triumphant after a prolonged
war in a foreign city, but his loving
wife Dejanira is caught off-guard by
her husband’s relationship with a
mysterious prisoner of war, a princess
named Iole. Dejanira is soon plunged
into an intensely felt jealousy. And
though Hercules appears every bit
the proud and honourable hero, his
wartime experiences have left him
fundamentally displaced from his
past life, and equally unprepared
for what awaits in the civilian world.
“The god of battle quits the bloody
field,” he sings, “And useless hang the
glitt’ring spear and shield,” but the
deeds committed in combat, including
the likelihood of sexual infidelity,
persist as an unacknowledged
minefield between Hercules and his
wife. They fight bitterly, he retreats
into incommunicative silence, and
she grows suicidal. Before long, the
situation explodes.

“When everyone’s back together again
[after a military deployment],” Sellars
explains, “there’s a whole lot of things
that neither side knows about the
other, that have been covered up –
for positive reasons maybe – but that
end up becoming deadly fault lines.

“For Handel, as for Sophocles, it
was this image of the most powerful
person on earth, the strong man,
being unbelievably vulnerable. And,
in fact, being in denial about a lot of
the deepest points of vulnerability.”

The genius of Handel is in finding
a musical language commensurate
to the psychological experience of
post-traumatic stress. In Hercules,
Handel uses da capo arias, which
have a cyclical structure whereby
the singer returns to a previous
section of music, following an A-B-A
pattern, as if haunted by a previously
recurring experience. (Translated
from Italian, da capo means, literally,
“from the head.”)

Singing a da capoaria is a structural
analogue “of what it means to work
through your issues,” Sellars says.
“You can’t just say, ‘okay, now you’re
fine,’ but, in fact, you have to go back
and work on it. And you have to dig
out all of this emotional stuff that has
been locked up and has been denied…
it’s what’s involved in these extreme
vocal melismas that Handel writes,
where a single word will have 150
notes. And that’s because in one word
– for most people it’s just a word –
for [a veteran] there’s a roller coaster
of emotions; there is an entire set
of experiences that flash inside that
one word.”

Alongside the personal excavation
undertaken in the arias, Handel
“places the huge choruses, where you
get the power of citizens, and you say,
‘wait a minute, our whole society is
in danger!’ You can’t just pathologize
that person who just screamed in
pain in the last aria.”

Though Sellars readily admits that
the subject matter is challenging,
he also emphasizes that “Handel
believed that the first way to go into
a difficult or dangerous place is with
a lot of beauty. So the music is just
ravishingly beautiful. It transmutes
the suffering into another place and
you don’t run away from it, but you
go towards it.” In this way, Handel’s
opera succeeds both as a precise,
mimetically accurate diagnosis of
the experience, and as a vehicle
of the healing process itself.

10 Things to Know About Gaetano Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux

This April, Donizetti's 'Tudor Trilogy' comes to an end with the COC premiere of Roberto Devereux. Here are ten key things you may want to know before you head to your seat!

1) Royal Intrigues
In the opera, a cloud of suspicion hangs over the Queen’s beloved Roberto Devereux, who has been accused of treason by members of Parliament. Elisabetta (Elizabeth I) doesn’t believe the charges, but she soon learns that Devereux might have betrayed her in another, more personal way, by falling in love with Sara, the Duchess of Nottingham. As Devereux’s life hangs in the balance, the Queen must navigate between her obligations as monarch and her all-too-human emotions as a woman in love.

2) A prima donna role
Roberto Devereux (1837) is the final instalment in Gaetano Donizetti’s “Tudor Trilogy” which also includes Anna Bolena (1830) and Maria Stuarda (1835). Central to each of these operas is a soprano role which stretches the singer to the limits of her technical and dramatic capabilities. It’s generally agreed that the role of Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux represents the summit of these prima donna (principal female) roles with regards to difficulty.

3) The best of bel cantoBel canto (literally, “beautiful singing”) is a term usually applied to early 19th-century Italian operas with a highly exhibitionist style of singing. Though some bel canto operas seem to privilege vocal showmanship at the expense of storytelling and characterization, in Roberto Devereux the brilliant singing stems directly from emotions related to the text and also from the influence of the words themselves – the colour of the consonants and vowels of the Italian language. This requires a huge investment of dramatic as well as vocal energy from the singer – quite the opposite of the stereotypical view of the prettily chirping bel canto “nightingale.” Hear the music in our listening guide.

Sondra Radvanovsky as Anna Bolena in a photo for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

4) The Return of Sondra Radvanovsky
One of the world’s best sopranos, Sondra Radvanovsky returns to the COC after her stunning debut with the company (Aida, 2010), to sing the role of Elisabetta for the very first time in her career. She has also been engaged by the Met to perform the role.

Ms Radvanovsky “sings with unflinching honesty and uncommon intensity…” The New York Times

5) Triple Crown
With her role debut at the COC, Sondra Radvanovsky will have performed all three Donizetti queens, a significant achievement. Famously, the great American soprano Beverly Sills, who also accomplished the triple crown in the 1970s, reputedly said the difficulty of singing all three roles may have shortened her career by at least four years.

6) COC Premiere
Roberto Devereux has never been seen at the Canadian Opera Company, and this premiere offers Toronto a unique opportunity to experience this powerful drama of show-stopping vocal fireworks and intense emotions.

7) Elizabethan-inspired production
This production from Dallas Opera, directed by Stephen Lawless, takes its inspiration from the powerful personality of Queen Elizabeth I, and adopts a theatrical style that was popular during her reign. Within this historical framework, the creative team found inspiration in one of the most famous Elizabethan playhouses, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

8) Staging the Queen’s Biography

The production makes a number of references to significant moments in Queen Elizabeth’s life: three large display cases appear at the top of the overture, each containing an actor to represent an aspect of Elizabeth’s difficult childhood, including Henry VIII (Elizabeth’s father), Anne Boleyn (Elizabeth’s mother), as well as a young Elizabeth. At the end of the overture, models of warships sail onto the front of the stage, depicting the greatest naval victory of Elizabeth’s reign: repelling the vast Spanish Armada.

9) Elizabethan costumes
Designer Ingeborg Bernerth’s costumes are generally period-specific and reflect the era in which Roberto Devereux has been set, though some pieces have been modernized (the men’s costumes in particular). Queen Elizabeth was the first monarch to take an interest in fashion and its effect on status and societal perceptions. Her rule was a prosperous one and fashions were correspondingly luxurious and elaborate, often embellished and exaggerated.

10) What to Listen For
Get the musical highlights with our listening guide here. For a quick preview, visit our listening guide.

Photo: (top) (l – r) Scott Quinn as Lord Cecil, Hasmik Papian as Elisabetta, Andrew Oakden as Sir Gualtiero Raleigh, David Kempster as Duke of Nottingham and Stephen Costello as Roberto Devereux in the Dallas Opera production of Roberto Devereux, 2009. Photo by Karen Almond; (middle) Sondra Radvanovsky as Anna Bolena in a promotional photo for the Chicago Lyric Opera. Photo by Cade Martin; (bottom) Stephen Costello as Roberto Devereux and Hasmik Papian as Elisabetta in the Dallas Opera production of Roberto Devereux, 2009. Photo by Karen Almond.